The exemplary embodiment relates to a system and method for named entity resolution. It finds particular application in the identification of metonymy for applications such as information extraction in general, question answering, machine translation, and anaphora resolution.
Metonymy is a form of figurative speech, in which one expression is used to refer to the standard referent of a related expression. For example, named entities, such as the names of persons, organizations, and locations, have a literal meaning and are frequently used in that sense. Beyond their literal meaning, however, named entities are also frequently subject to metonymy. Named entities can thus refer to other concepts than the standard referent, as shown on the following examples of metonymy:
(1) At the time of Vietnam, increased spending led to inflation.
(2) The BMW slowed down.
In Example (1), Vietnam, the name of a location, is used to refer to an event, i.e., the war that happened there. In (2), the name of the company BMW stands for a vehicle manufactured by the company and therefore refers to an object.
In information extraction, it is particularly useful to detect such metonymies on named entities, to be able to detect the proper nature of concepts expressed in a document. Consequently, detection of metonymy is also very useful in tasks such as machine translation, question answering and anaphora resolution.
There remains a need for a natural language processing system capable of detecting metonymy in a wide variety of contexts.